Copilot Retires Six Models on 14 December and Free Users Cannot Pick a Replacement

GitHub is retiring six models across every Copilot experience on 14 December 2026: Claude Fable 5, Claude Haiku 4.5, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Gemini 4 Argon, Grok 4.6 and Kimi K3. Enterprise and Business administrators get the suggested replacements enabled automatically unless they disabled the global default. Copilot Free and Copilot Student users have no model picker at all, because GitHub documents those plans as having access to models through auto model selection only.¹

The deprecation itself is routine housekeeping. What the announcement exposes is a structural difference between the plans that the pricing page states plainly and most comparisons ignore.²

The retirement list

Prices measured on 27 October 2026. Vendor plan terms, allowances and prices change without notice, so treat every figure on this page as a dated snapshot rather than a permanent fact. Where a number here differs from the vendor's own pricing page, the vendor's page is correct and the figure above is simply older than it.

One model has an escape clause. Claude Haiku 4.5 stays available to individual subscribers on annual plans, so an annual Pro subscriber keeps a model that a monthly one loses. That is a useful reminder to check which billing cadence your subscription runs on before the blackout.

The affected surfaces are broader than chat. GitHub lists Copilot Chat, inline edits, ask mode, agent mode and code completions, which means the deprecation reaches every part of the product that talks to a model, including the part that was never subject to a model picker in the first place.

Who has to do something, and who cannot

Enterprise and Business administrators: nothing, if the global default is on. The replacements are enabled automatically. If an administrator has turned off default enablement or explicitly disabled a model, they have to enable the alternative through model policies in Copilot settings, and until they do, users see a smaller model list.

Individual paid subscribers: choose the replacement in the model selector. Pro, Pro+, Max and Business all list explicit model access, so the swap is a settings change.

Free and Student: nothing at all, because there is nothing to choose. GitHub's supported-models documentation carries a note that Copilot Student and Copilot Free users have access to models through auto model selection only. Model choice is a paid-plan feature, listed as such on the plans page where Pro advertises "model selection" as one of the things $10 buys.

So the six retirements do not cost a free user anything they had. They also do not offer a free user anything they could do about it. The system picks a fallback and the user finds out which one by using it.

Why auto selection is a different product, not a smaller one

An automatic router is not choosing the best model. It is choosing the model that best fits the request against a policy the vendor sets, constrained by what the plan is allowed to touch. For a free account those constraints are tighter than for a paid one, which is why the same task can behave differently on two plans without either user changing a setting.

GitHub also documents a base and long-term support model: GPT-5.3-Codex is used in auto selection when no other model is available. That is the floor of the system, and it is worth knowing which model you are actually getting when the router picks for you.

The practical effect is that the deprecation notice is mostly irrelevant to free users and simultaneously the clearest statement of what the free tier is. Nothing breaks on 14 December. Nothing improves either.

What to do before the date

If you are on a paid plan, open the model selector now and check which model you have been using. Six of them leave in four weeks, and the replacement suggested for Kimi K3 is not yet named, which is the only entry in the table that leaves a gap rather than a migration.

If you are on the free tier, the date passes without incident, and that is the answer to a question usually asked the other way round: not whether Copilot Free is generous, but whether it is yours to configure. The free plan carries no credit balance to spend on model choice either, so the two limits reinforce each other into a single shape: you get a capable assistant that makes its own decisions.

For anyone paying, the swap is a five-minute task on 13 December. For anyone not paying, the only sensible preparation is to know that the router changed underneath you and that the behaviour you liked last month may not be the behaviour you get next month.

Frequently asked questions

When are the Copilot models being retired?
14 December 2026, across Copilot Chat, inline edits, ask and agent modes, and code completions.

Can I keep Claude Haiku 4.5?
Only if you are an individual subscriber on an annual plan. The deprecation does not apply to those customers.

Will Copilot Free lose access to models?
No. Free uses auto model selection rather than a chosen model, so the router handles the swap without user action.

Can free users select a replacement model?
No. Model selection is a paid-plan feature. Free and Student plans are documented as auto selection only.

What replaces Kimi K3?
GitHub lists the replacement as to be announced, the only retirement without a named successor.

Do administrators need to enable the new models?
Only if they turned off the global default. Otherwise the suggested alternatives are enabled automatically.

The six retirements and their replacement dates, the Claude Haiku 4.5 annual-plan exception, the affected surfaces, the default-enablement behaviour for Business and Enterprise, and the Kimi K3 gap all taken from GitHub's changelog entry of 13 November 2026. The auto-selection-only rule for Free and Student plans, the per-plan model table and the GPT-5.3-Codex long-term support fallback are from GitHub's supported models documentation, read on 14 November 2026.

Sources

1. GitHub Changelog: Upcoming deprecation of selected GitHub Copilot models in December: github.blog/changelog/2026-11-13-upcoming-deprecation-of-selected-github-copilot-models-in-december. Used for: The six retirements, 14 December date, replacement mapping, Haiku 4.5 annual-plan exception, affected surfaces and default enablement behaviour.
2. GitHub Docs: Supported AI models in GitHub Copilot: docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/ai-models/supported-models. Used for: Free and Student access through auto model selection only, and the GPT-5.3-Codex LTS fallback.

All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 27 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.